Report of the director general growth and adjustment in Asia: issues of employment, productivity, migration and women workers

Five years have clapsed since the Ninth Asian Regional Conference of the ILO in Manila.
When the last Conference concluded its work, the economic recession was already severely affecting the social and economic performance of many member States. Since then, rates of economic growth have decreased in most countries, and have sometimes been negative, as in the developed market economies as a whole in 1982 (see table 1). Even when this is not the case, per capita income has fallen in a number of poorer developing countries, as a consequence of rapid population growth. Owing to the underutilisation of productive capacity and to associated redundancies, unemployment rates in developed countries, especially the member countries of the European Community, have been increasing at a rapid rate.

The impact of the recession on individual countries, however, has varied greatly between regions and subregions (see table 2) as well as between countries. The average rate of growth of South East Asian economies during the early 1980s, for example, was higher than that of other regions. The resilience of those economies may be attributed to the successful readjustment of industrial structures and expansion of manufactured exports, better performance of the agricultural sector, and the provision of engineering and construction services overseas.